Thomas Paine and the Right of Democratic Consent

I am currently reading Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. A spirited rebuttal of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine's work wades through both political theory and the history of French Revolution to establish its propositions viz. that people have natural rights, and that they are within their rights to overthrow a government that fails to respect their natural rights. For Paine, the French Revolution was an exercise of this basic political right.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Source: Wikipedia

Of the many problems Paine dealt with, one that captured my attention the most was the 'problem of consent'. In Burke's Reflections, he argued that the English people had renounced their right to change their 'governors' in 1688 when the Parliament submitted the nation and its future generations to the new King. For Paine, the parliament of 1688 didn't have the right to bind the future generations, as it did itself. Therefore, even though the Parliament had pronounced such a declaration, it was null and void, and without effect on future generations of England. This was because, for Paine, politics is the realm of the living, and the deeds of the dead men couldn't hold a veto over the aspirations of the living. The line of defense adopted by Burke is preposterous in a country like England, where the individual liberty of a person is legally recognised once he/she reached majority at the age of twenty-one. If the Church and the parents didn't have the right of command over the free persons, then it followed, for Paine, that the dead didn't have it either.

Thomas Paine's criticism of Burke's formulation of the problem of consent goes deeper. For both Burke and Paine, the question whether or not people had the right of consent against their rulers boils down to whether or not people had rights, and how did they obtain them. Burke traced the origin of rights to historical precedents whereas for Paine it was a matter of innate natural rights. Paine argued that to ground the rights of people on accidents of history was arbitrary. If one went far enough in time, one would find counterexamples to the one on which the rights are grounded. To choose one over the other is based on personal preferences, and thus arbitrary. Therefore, to argue the case of rights based on precedents would 'prove' anything and 'establish' nothing. Paine 'established' his case, the origin of Rights of Man, based on natural rights that he gained by the virtue of 'unity of creation'. Firstly, men belonged to the 'unity' and 'equality' of Man (as a single species). Thus, no other man had innate rights over other men, and pretensions to the contrary are just that, pretensions. Secondly, he derived these natural rights from his Maker, God. The Man was imbued with natural rights by his Maker, who created him after Himself. Thus, imbued with equal, natural rights from his Creator, the Rights of Man was a fact to reckon with, and not the product of contingencies of history.

Paine's defence of the people's legitimate right to change their governors and the government is important even in a democracy because it provides the theoretical basis for periodic elections, where people's consent is sought at regular intervals. Unlike Burke's stance (that the people are bound by the decisions of the past generations), people's will isn't considered either absolute or their consent irrevocable. People and their representatives are allowed to reevaluate their older decisions, on the light of reason and experience. Although it isn't a foolproof system, as the state of contemporary democracies show, nations are yet to devise a system that is fairer and more practical.